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*UNEDITED*
Chapter One
Dominic “Chief” Snow
Friday 5:45am
My eyes popped open to the sound of my alarm and slowly oscillated to the left when I felt a shift underneath the covers. Kamara was still sound asleep, yet her thigh was playing peek-a-boo with me behind the sheets. As much as I enjoyed her company the night before, I didn’t have time to take another dip inside her warmth. It was time to get up and start my day. Most importantly, it was time for business. After doing my morning cardio workout, I grabbed a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice from the kitchen and went down to my study to make sure I had everything in order for the day before heading into the bathroom.
The steam from the hot shower opened my pores as I stood underneath the shower head, running each play through my head as I scrubbed every inch of my caramel brown six-foot-two frame. Dripping wet, I exited the shower and ran my hands down my beard. Through the fog coating on the mirror, I could still see Kamara’s silhouette from the bedroom. We’d been fuck buddies off and on for the past few months. She was cool, but in my eyes, we were just having a good time. I’d done the marriage and vows once before and had the divorce attorney fees to prove it. I wasn’t about to do it again.
After getting dressed, I leaned down to whisper in Kamara’s ear, careful not to scare her into an abrupt awakening. “Wake up, Kamara.”
She groaned with a groggy smile before fluttering her long eyelashes and glancing up at me. “I’m up.”
“I’m about to head out soon. I got somewhere to be,” I alerted her.
“So? I can still be here when you get back, y’know?” She suggested, sticking her ass out of the sheets to give me a peek of what I was sure to be another good time.
I quickly shook my head, shooting her dreams and sexual advances down in the process. “Nah. That’s not my style. You know that. Now get dressed.”
A second groan escaped past her lips before she sat up and strutted her naked body into the bathroom. I only allowed Kamara to spend the night from time to time out of respect. She wasn’t a hoe, but she was far from what I would consider to be my main, I would never leave her in my house alone. When I was headed out the door, she had to be too. That was just how I carried shit. She stepped out of the bathroom draped in the Gucci sweater dress she’d shown up on my doorstep wearing just eight hours before.
“Sure you don’t want me to make you some breakfast or something?”
“Nah, I ate already.”
She rolled her coffee brown eyes. “Orange juice and a blunt ain’t breakfast, Chief, but okay.”
“How’d you know, I—”
“You may have washed it off your body, but I can still smell it lingering in the air. You know you smoke that potent shit.”
She wasn’t lying. “You right about that.”
“So, I’ll see you later?”
“I’ll call you,” I responded.
“You sure?”
“Don’t I always?” I asked back.
*****
Thirty minutes after the bank opened, I walked inside dressed in plain clothes, made a modest deposit, and made sure I scoped out the place one last time. On my way out, a gust of wind brushed past me, sending the glass door snapping back in the opposite direction. I glanced down and caught hold of a flying folder blowing my way as papers scattered across the sidewalk.
“Fuck!” A woman mumbled as she scurried to snatch up as many as she could without sitting the pink box she had in her other hand down on the ground. I bent down to help, extending the papers I’d retrieved back to her. Before I opened my mouth to speak, she thanked me without bothering to fully turn her face to mine and hurriedly shuffled through the bank doors. All I saw was a tattoo of a hummingbird adorning the back of her golden-brown neck as she disappeared behind the thick glass. Turning away, I headed down the sidewalk with a smirk lifting one side of my face. So far, so good. Everything was going as planned.
After moving my car, I walked up on my brothers Rome and Baby, and Rome’s best friend Cash, who were parked in a utility van two blocks down from the bank.
“What it look like in there?” Cash asked after I climbed inside through the back.
“Just like I said, three tellers in there right now and about seven customers. Truck drops in thirty minutes and then it’s go time before they get it in the safe,” I announced.
As the master planner for the day’s event, I had been preparing for the moment for the past two months. Everything had to go as planned. I couldn’t afford to have any of us end the day in a body bag or behind bars. We had to get in and out as clean and as quickly as possible with as many bands as we could carry.
I slid my gloves over my hands to cover the tattoos as my youngest brother, Baby, climbed out of the van and pulled his black cap and hoodie over his head to shield his eyes and head full of soft coils. The four of us were draped in all black from head to toe—masks, body armor, and military grade weapons in tow. The wind whistled in tandem with the clicking of Baby’s cigarette lighter as he leaned against the peeling green paint on the work van to light his blunt.
“Nigga, you gotta smoke right now?” Cash asked, tucking his dreads.
“I always smoke before a job, nigga. It clears my mind. Helps a nigga find his Zen.” He chuckled as smoke exited his nostrils.
I sucked my teeth as I eyed the clock. “Eyes up, mothafuckas. It’s almost showtime. Baby, remember, you start bussin’ as soon as you see they got the safe cracked open.”
After taking a couple more puffs of his blunt, Baby put it out against the van’s side mirror and headed up the street to the bank’s entrance. Once he was inside, the three of us strapped up and waited for the sound of Baby’s gun firing toward the ceiling before we braced for impact.
*****
“Get down on the fuckin’ ground! Down on the ground now!” I roared, firing a clip at the ceiling as soon as I jumped out of the van that Cash had driven straight through the bank doors.
The place erupted in screams as Cash shot out the cameras. “Nobody has to get hurt,” he yelled out.
I took down the two guards and zip tied their wrists and ankles. Rome shuffled all the bank’s employees to the back, while Baby forced the customers to place their faces against the cold ground. It was precision at its fuckin’ finest.
After their cell phones had all been taken and zip ties were tightened around their wrists, we started on stuffing our bags with cold hard cash from the safe.
Handgun on my waist and machine gun in my arms, I yelled, “We are here for money, not for you!”
“That’s right! No heroes today!” Baby yelled out behind me before pushing a woman to the ground.
The fear in her eyes tore into mine before she drove her stare into the ground, causing me to freeze in my step when I saw her. Although I hadn’t fully seen her face the first time, I recalled the hummingbird tattoo on the back of her neck from memory. She was the woman whose papers I’d picked up outside. I thought she would have made it out by then. I never expected for her to still be inside the bank at the time of the robbery. Careful not to fuck up what I came there to do, I stepped over her and yelled out, “We’ve got forty-five seconds! Forty-five seconds!”
The seconds were fleeting past us as we shuffled toward our planned exit routes with bags full of as many dead presidents as we could carry. As planned, I hurriedly sparked the match and tossed it inside the van to burn any traces of anything we left behind. As soon as Cash and Baby reached the gaping hole where the doors used to be, Cash was tackled by one of the customers who had somehow managed to get himself out of the zip ties. Baby didn’t even bother to blink before pulling out the handgun on his waist and putting hot lead right in his chest. Screams of various pitches rang out as the man’s lifeless body thudded against the ground. My eyes widened. Fuck. Everything had gone from sugar to shit in a matter of fuckin’ seconds.
“Let’s go! Let’s go! We gotta fuckin’ go!” I yelled.
The four of us split up into pairs of two, Rome and I escaping through an access tunnel underneath the building, and Baby and Cash through the employee door located at the back of the bank. Ten minutes later, Cash and Baby pulled up in a white utility van with the words Harold’s Leathers and Luxury Imports sketched on the side, meeting Rome and I at the tunnel exit. After tossing everything inside, Cash put foot to pedal and the four of us sped off.
*****
Hours later, the four of us met at our secure, steel bunker hours away from the city to count our gain. The bunker was in a spot that was almost invisible to the naked eye above ground if you didn’t know where to look. We were underground and surrounded by a remote wooded area and sealed from the outside world. So far, Rome and I had counted in the upwards of $1,000,000 in crisp, stiff bills, which was almost an easy $250,000 a piece for a job that had started and ended in six minutes and forty-two seconds.
“If you find anything marked, burn it,” I directed, while pacing the dusty bunker floor, “and where the fuck is Baby at?”
“I’m right here, nigga,” he responded, strolling up behind me with a puff of smoke etched around him.
Without uttering another word, I turned and swiped my open hand at him, crumpling his Armani T-shirt in my grasp. “Eight weeks! Eight fuckin’ weeks of recon and planning and you go and fuck it up in five minutes!” I growled.
Stacks of money went crashing to the ground as my brother Rome jumped up and put his hands on my shoulders to try and split us apart. “Yo, Chief. Ease up. C’mon.”
“Nah, fuck that!” I yelled, shaking him off me and pushing him out of the way.
I continued to charge at Baby, who had squared his stance and tossed his blunt on the ground so that he could have both his hands free.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, nigga? We got what we came for, didn’t we? So why the fuck you trippin’?” Baby yelled, fists instinctively protecting his face.
“We ain’t come for bodies, mothafucka! Everything from the exact location to where Cash drove the van into, to the speed he was going when he did it had been planned out so we didn’t have any fuckin’ bodies on us for this!” I could feel the veins in my head throbbing to the brink of bursting. I was mad enough to scorch the entire earth. “I swear to God you lucky you family!” I yelled, shoving him back a few steps.
He recovered his balance as he sliced his eyes into mine. “Or what?”
He was tempting me. No. Begging me to beat the brakes off his juvenile actin’ ass. “Or else I would bury your fuckin’ ass alive for what you did in there today!” I reminded him without a drop of remorse or hesitation in my tone. “You always flyin’ off the fuckin’ handles or doin’ some impulsive shit that I gotta fuckin’ clean up!”
My last statement alerted both Rome and Cash to double-team me in order to save Baby’s life. “Chill, C. Take a step back and take a breath, nigga,” Rome called out to me again while Cash held me back. “We all still breathin’. That’s all that matters.”
Rome’s calm, reasoning voice did nothing to stop the amount of rage in me. Baby was gon’ make me go back to the old me on his ass. The three of us were a mix of Jamaican and Cuban and had the most unorthodox fusion of genes from both bloodlines.
“Yeah, nigga take a fuckin’ breath and put some respect on my shit! If it wasn’t for me shootin’ that mothafucka, Cash might be in a body bag right now. Is that what you want? I told them nobody needed to be the fuckin’ hero and he didn’t listen! We were almost in the clear! What the fuck did you expect me to do?”
As much as I wanted him to be wrong, a part of me knew he wasn’t, which pissed me off even more. The difference is, I wouldn’t have gone for the kill shot. We didn’t need any unnecessary heat on us and leaving a trail of bullets in our wake wasn’t smart for anybody.
“Say another mothafuckin’ word and I swear to God!” I warned, lunging out of Cash’s hold.
“Nah! Let ‘em go, Cash! Let ‘em go!” Baby chanted, gaslighting me to the point of no return.
I pushed forward in his direction. I wasn’t going to be satisfied until I put fist to fuckin’ face. “All I know is, you better get rid of that shit. Drop it in the middle of the fuckin’ ocean tonight! No loose ends, you hear me?”
He scowled. “I fuckin’ hear you, nigga. Don’t worry, I got it.”
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